Monthly Tech-Tip | No tracking! No ads! |
Orange is a very difficult color in ceramics. Inclusion stains are the only reliable method, they universally used in industry. But you could ignore that and try a bunch of recipes online. When they are presented on flashy web pages they can look tantalizing. But beware! Are the exotic materials you need to buy worth it. Will it actually fire orange? Will it craze or run or blister or leach or cutlery mark or crawl or settle like a rock in the bucket? It is much better to put an orange encapsulated stain into a transparent glaze you already know works on your clay. Then just experiment with percentage to get the color you want. Or, how about trying a premixed orange at low fire? Ware can be amazingly functional at low temperatures (e.g. cone 03-02) and bright colours labelled for cone 06 mostly work fine in that range.
This lab is certified by the US Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for drinking water and wastewater analysis. They also provide pottery glaze leaching analyses (an acid solution is kept in contact with the glaze and then analysed for trace levels of specific metals). Each suspected metal to be tested for entails a separate charge ($30-60 in this case, could be less for you). That means that testing one glaze for several metals could cost $200. How to make sense of these numbers? Google the term: "heavy metals drinking water standards", and click "Images" to find charts with lots of data. Searching pages for this term will find books having detailed sections on each of the metals. Typically you are only interested in one metal in a specific glaze (often cobalt or manganese). There are ways to sleep better (about the likelihood your glazes are leaching metals) if you cannot do this: Do a simple GLLE test. And avoid online trafficking in hazardous recipes. Better to find a quality base glaze (matte and transparent) that works well on your clay body. Then add colorants, opacifiers and variegators; but doing so in a conservative manner. And use a liner glaze on food surfaces.
Articles |
Trafficking in Glaze Recipes
The trade is glaze recipes has spawned generations of potters going up blind alleys trying recipes that don't work and living with ones that are much more trouble than they are worth. It is time to leave this behind and take control. |
---|---|
Glossary |
Encapsulated Stain
This is a type of stain manufacture that enables the use of metal oxides (like cadmium) under temperature conditions in which they would normally fail. |
Buy me a coffee and we can talk